Is It Something In the Air? Gates on Creative Capitalism

My last post on Bill Strickland noted that one man has started from a hard spot, risen, and lifted many on his way up. Now Bill Gates, privileged man, ruthless business man has seen the light and preaches creative capitalism. (It kind of reminds me of the scene in the Blues Brothers when the boys see the light and decide to reunite the band. Bill is less animated but may have a little more power).

Here is a short interview from the Wall Street JournalAnd here is the entire speech from Davos.

Now to be clear is there reason to question the world’s richest man who attained his position through a different philosophy? Sure. But he has new view. It is worth a listen. And yes let the pure market folks begin the parade of derision. Mr. Gates may be overstating the ideals and in some ways seems to be treading the corporate social responsibility ideas of the past. Still, he is not exactly an idiot. His new ideas rubbing against the market ideas with which he is I think familiar may yield new ways to bring about the creative capitalism he is trying to espouse. As I write this post Gates talks of MS’s philanthropy. It is hard to swallow. Many of the press stories about MS show it as purely driven to colonize the world. Gates says there is more to what MS does. Yet maybe as Google rises, Gates really wants to undercut it. Maybe he thinks he can do it with this move. Whatever the result, Mr. Gates is using Adam Smith, C.K. Prahalad, who wrote “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and many other sources to inform his philosophy.